World reaches a crossroads – catastrophe or livable future

After a 10,000-year journey, civilisation has reached a climate crossroads: what we do in the next few years will determine our fate for millennia. That choice is laid bare in the landmark report published yesterday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), assembled by the world’s foremost climate experts and approved by all the world’s governments. The next update will be in about 2030 – by that time the most critical choices will have been made.

The report is clear on what is at stake – everything. “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all. The choices and actions implemented in this decade [ie by 2030] will have impacts now and for thousands of years,” it says.

The climate crisis is already taking away lives and livelihoods across the world, and the report says future effects will be even worse than was thought: “For any given future warming level, many climate-related risks are higher than [previously] assessed. Continued emissions will further affect all major climate system components, and many changes will be irreversible on centennial to millennial time scales.”

To follow the path of least suffering – limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C – greenhouse gas emissions must peak “at the latest before 2025”, the report says, followed by “deep global reductions”. Yet in 2022 global emissions rose again to record levels.

The 1.5C goal appears all but out of reach, the IPCC says: “In the near term, global warming is more likely than not to reach 1.5C even under a very low-emission scenario.”

A huge ramping up of work to protect people will therefore be needed. For example, “extreme sea level events” expected once a century will strike at least once a year by 2100 in half of all monitored locations.

However, the faster emissions are cut, the better it will be for billions of people: “Adverse impacts and related losses and damages from climate change will escalate with every increment of global warming.”

Every tonne of CO2 emissions prevented will also reduce the risk of true catastrophe in the form of “abrupt and/or irreversible changes in the climate system, including changes triggered when tipping points are reached”.

The report presents the choice humanity faces in stark terms, made all the more chilling by the fact this is compromise language, agreed by all the world’s nations – many would go further if speaking alone. But it also presents the signposts to the path the world should and could take to secure that livable future.

Three decades of IPCC warnings, mostly ignored, have brought us to the climate crossroads. As we stand here, perhaps this is the simplest way to state the choice set out by the IPCC for the world’s political and corporate leaders: what price a sustainable and livable future for all?

The report presents the choice humanity faces in stark terms, made all the more chilling by the fact this is compromise language